Sometimes aspects of real life feel surreal. This past week has featured a couple moments of "did that just happen?"
Nose Candy:
Thursday morning began as a typical day. After a night of restless tossing and turning, I woke with the kids shortly after the sun crept over the horizon. By the time the husband came home from work, I'd already manned the fort for a couple hours, and begged him for a reprieve before he retreated to the room for the day. This is our dance. My sleeping habits have grown progressively off kilter as of late, leaving me to negotiate for naps with Captain Third Shift, but I digress. I passed out only to wake up to the unholy caterwauling of our eldest, Malcolm, accompanied by the husband roaring my name. Stumbling out, brain about forty paces behind the rest of me, I find them struggling in the living room, Malcolm screeching like a banshee, limbs flailing, while his doting father attempts to peer up his nose. Uh oh. This can't be good. What has happened? Malcolm, in a moment of sheer brilliance has inserted a small piece of candy up his left nostril. Candy we have vacuumed our treacherous carpet for several times, but the bastards keep squatting in those wily fibers. It took our son five years to shove something up his nose, but he chose a winner. The candy was so small we could not see it, or feel it, to extract it. A call to the pediatrician revealed they didn't want to deal with it either, which left....the ER. Balls.
There is nothing worse than sitting in the ER with my son. Between his cat like attention span, utter lack of patience and the zero entertainment options of the facility, my morning was hosed. How much did I dread this visit? Enough to reconsider when he calmed down on the way out to the car. "It's candy," I grumble to myself, "It'll dissolve." But no, the doctor has warned we don't want that going through his nasal passage. Off to the ER we go. After a quick stay in the waiting room, (yay) we are lead to a sparse sterile exam room. After coaxing Malcolm through the usual vitals check in, we are left to our own devices,
for an hour. There is nothing to distract my darling boy in this room. We sing, we play a few clapping games, I make animal sounds for him to identify (I can't imagine what the nurses are thinking walking by this closed room). This eats up thirty minutes.
With an inward wince I hand over my cell phone, letting him play with some inane app, watching the battery life slowly drain away. I let my mind wander, keeping his hands off the various expensive machines clustered in the corners. A doctor finally enters.
Malcolm's calm is a lie. Within moments, we have banshee revisited, in stereo since noise bounces like a sound stage in here. Despite an RN and myself pinning him down, the doctor cannot locate the sugary culprit. Their recommendation? They ask me to plug his nostril and blow in his mouth, hoping to pop it out.
What? I feel like I'm being punk'd. With deep reservations I proceed to perform this technique, (did they learn this from Looney Toons?). Malcolm rewards my efforts with a slobbery reverb, blowing back, as I realize I didn't brush his teeth before taking off for the ER this morning. The bloody doctors are chuckling at me, asking if I want to try again. Yeah, thrilled to. Because I'm a masochist I close in to try again, rewarded by a writhing fit of giggles from my son. Zero point zero results.
"Well, can't see anything, it will have to come out on its own. Just watch for drainage."
I want to throttle the lot of them. I want to throttle the pediatrician for sending us on this fruitless time sink. I want to throttle them all over again as they leave me waiting for another hour before realizing they haven't discharged us....
I don't know if the pain or the four hour ER visit has engrained the lesson into Malcolm's head. The end result of our migraine inducing visit was a day fully frazzled and exhausted, another vacuuming session of our carpet "tan treachery", and some lovely colored snot a day later. (Blue, if you're wondering.)
Bad Religion:
My husband and his mother are fighting again. It has been a slow build, the kind where you can tell he grinds his teeth every time she opens her mouth. I have stood, poised between them, my feet on shaky ground for years now. Without the kids and my attempts to bolster some kind of relationship between the family, I wonder if he would have dealt with her at all. While both of them have individuals issues, my husband and I can usually talk through and solve the problems between us. The mother- in -law uses religion.
Disclaimer: Religion in general is one of those hot button topics. I have many opinions on the subject, but I am open minded when it comes to religion as a whole. Religion, itself, is not bad, it comes down to the individual. To me, religion is a guideline, a moral code to live by. I respect religion, I respect faith and beliefs, I will not tell you your faith is wrong, or sneer at your belief structure, and I expect the same courtesy in return. My relationship with "faith" as a concept is complicated and could fill a whole post on its own. I am gratified to have many excellent examples of religious people in my life, people who I respect for their faith and beliefs. Sadly my mother in law in not one of them.
Why? Here is spark which lit the five alarm fire:
She has refused to help watch the boys while my husband participates in his gaming activities because the gods in his game represent false idols and are trying to lead him astray, down the path to hell.
My husband tried, he listened to her view point. He tried to explain it was a fantasy game (legend of the five rings) and he does not believe these gods exist. He even took the approach of people worshipping various faiths around the world. Her response was unflattering to anyone not of the born again Christian faith. He argued it was fantasy, made up, not real, but she refused to budge from her stance. When he countered she reads fantasy, she responded with "only Christian authors."
We are big gamers in this household. We both play D&D with our circle of friends, various RPGS and video games. Now our relatively innocent lifestyle is being snubbed by a case of bad religion. I have trouble taking her serious. I am also pretty freaking insulted. Yes, my husband is going to be out of town for his nerd convention, but I asked her to watch our children so I could go to work, not flaunt my pagan ways with a rousing session of dungeon crawling, worshipping the God of Thieves. This development in her faith is unsettling and is a recent mutation. What's more disturbing than her off the wall judgment is she doesn't believe us when we tell her
we don't believe in these fantastical false idols.
I find myself between a rock and a hard place. Is there a manual to deal with this? I do not want to shut my mother in law out of the lives of her grandchildren but do I want to expose them to this kind of behavior? The fact this whole zany issue has driven a wedge into our family is uncomfortable, as if my skin is too tight to breathe in. I still have trouble believing this argument was real, that someone actually thinks this way. I guess I shall go back to writing my speculative fiction and further cement my place in hell.
